Jennifer Davis Michael
Perseverance
We mothers monitor our sons
racing, tugging, discharging
their demons in the placid grass,
their feet as light as astronauts’.
Gravity, of all authorities,
seems worth defying.
Still, their drawings bear it:
thick lines like fallen trees.
They’ve seen how weightless fog
can freeze and ground a strong pine.
We cup their faces in our hands,
afraid of what might spill.
Today, with half a million dead from Covid,
we watched the Perseverance
settle its wheels on the brickish sand
of Mars. And there was wind,
a sighing sound of weary mothers
holding all that space in their arms.